


Secret Keepers

by WonderBoy



Series: Get Some [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, Fluff, Friends With Benefits, Guns (mentioned), Heart-to-Heart, Implied Sexual Content, Inappropriate Humor, Light Angst, M/M, Pining, blink and you miss it - Freeform, casual touching, pesky feelings are my specialty, this is mostly just fluff tbh, very light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 14:12:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13905717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WonderBoy/pseuds/WonderBoy
Summary: This time when he smiles, it’s full force and suddenly it feels like the world has righted itself again. Keith hadn’t even realized it was off-kilter. Lance nudges him with his foot, and Keith forces the dopey smile he wore in response to Lance’s own grin off his face.“What?”“Since when are you so good at this?”“I promise I will go back to my regularly scheduled, anti-social robot speech in a few minutes.”Lance exaggeratedly wipes a hand over his forehead. “Thank God, I was a little worried for a moment.”*Another (hopefully) stand-alone sequel to Unfair (and Obvious and Picture Perfect), but actually requested this time ;)





	Secret Keepers

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read "Unfair," Keith gives Lance a blowjob in the kitchen, and it starts their FWB relationship. "Obvious" has no explicit content, but Lance gives Keith a bunch of hickeys. "Picture Perfect" was written before this piece but can be read before or after it, and is probably the most explicit in which Lance takes (lewd) pictures of Keith after they hookup. And they both have more feelings invested in this fwb relationship then they're letting on. That's about all you really need to know.
> 
> I'm so sorry its been so long since I've updated this series. This is what I get for multitasking. And by multitasking I mean starting multiple ongoing pieces and not wrapping any of them up before going back to school.
> 
> This particular piece is dedicated to my dear friend (lesbianakari on tumblr) who, though to my knowledge does not read this series, helped saved this fic so that I could finally use it instead of continuing to stare at it in disgust as I have since I started it back in December.
> 
> There is no explicit sexual content in this piece between Lance and Keith, in fact it has even less sexual content than "Obvious," but there are quotes from the back of/the actual book Loving You by Maureen Child which are taken from a sex scene, though nothing overly explicit. There is also multiple mentions of/discussions about guns/shooting (at a range). No one is hurt or uses guns in the actual plot of the story, but I just want everyone to be aware.
> 
> *the song lyrics at the beginning changed from True Love by P!nk feat. Lily Allen to Marijuana Breath by Adam Jensen

_It's human nature, it's in our bones_  
_Cause no one wants to be all alone_  
_I'm the darkness behind your eyes_  
_Killing brain cells and killing time_  
_..._  
_I can be your cure for loneliness_  
_A little something to help you forget_

_-Marijuana Breath, Adam Jensen_

* * *

 

Keith liked having his own space. When he was overwhelmed or tired and needed to be alone, having his own apartment was a blessing. He didn't have to worry about bothering a roommate with how he spent his free time, or being bothered by a roommate's bad habits. And it, in many ways, felt like the ultimate symbol of his independence. 

But he loved Lance, Hunk, and Pidge’s shared apartment. The moment he walked in, he felt enveloped in the warm foundation of their friendship. Pictures decorated every available wall. Those of their families were mostly in frames hung along the walls or propped on shelves. Strung around the apartment however, held up by clothespins, were dozens of Lance’s pictures: Pidge slaving away in her room, bent over some piece of tech broken down into hundreds of pieces; Hunk pulling out a sheet of cookies from the oven; selfies of the three of them from the past years and all they had done. Even the simplest of the photographs radiated a kind of warmth all of Lance’s work seemed to emulate.

Keith didn’t realize he had started to join the trio on the walls until it’s staring him in the face. The newest addition to the collection, hung in a place of honor in the living room, is a picture of him. From what he can tell, the candid was from his last birthday-a surprise the trio and Shiro had orchestrated. Shiro and Hunk flank him in the background of the picture, colorful hats on their heads contrasting the dark background, but the only one actually in focus is Keith himself, his eyes closed and head thrown back as he laughs at something out of sight. He hadn’t even realized Lance was taking pictures at the time.

“There are more down the hall,” Pidge’s voice pulls Keith from his stupor as she walks past him to the kitchen, her hands full of an obscene number of dirty cups.

“Uh, do you need help?” He asks, rather than rushing towards the hall like his immediate instinct tells him to. He might not have remembered Lance taking pictures earlier in the night, but he knows there is one picture from the night floating around that half of him wants to see and half hopes didn’t actually come out.

“No, she doesn’t!” Hunk’s voice carries over from the kitchen and Pidge rolls her eyes.

“He’s mad that I’ve been hoarding the cups. It’s not like I was going to keep them forever, I just didn’t have time to wash them yet.” She explains to Keith in a hushed voice.

“Other people live here too, Pidge!”

Pidge shakes her head but doesn’t argue. “The selfie you and Lance took is by his room.” She says to Keith before resuming her trek to the kitchen.

Keith’s self-control keeps him in the living room until Pidge is out of sight and cannot be witness to how desperately he wants to see if the photo is as damning as he expects. He notices some new pictures scattered between the old ones, and the living room ones that were displaced, but he doesn’t pay close attention to them. Two pictures over from the closed door of Lance’s bedroom, the selfie stares him down. A polka-dot hat is perched crookedly on Lance’s head. Though he’s the one holding the camera, he isn’t looking at it, instead he’s pressing a kiss to Keith’s cheek. His other arm is thrown over Keith’s shoulders, holding him close. Past-Keith smiles up shyly into the camera. He’s never been comfortable in pictures, but he knows the flush of his cheeks in the picture is not from embarrassment or alcohol in that moment.

He wants to tear it down from the wall, but he can’t decide if it’s so no one else can ever see it and realize how totally gone on the other boy he is, or so he can keep it with him forever.

He retreats back to the living room instead, hoping distance will keep him from doing something stupid. Hunk is sitting on couch, when he returns. An apron is tied around his waist, but he’s reclining on the couch reading a magazine. He greets Keith with a wave but doesn’t put down his reading material.

“There’s just about twenty more minutes for dinner.”

“Thanks,” Keith says simply, dropping onto the other end of the couch. He drops his bookbag at his feet and leans against the arm rest. His own laughing face mocks him from across the room.

He quickly turns away, praying for a distraction from the pictures, and finds one remarkably easy. On the coffee table. Curious, he reaches for the pair of blue, heavy duty earmuffs and purple-tinted glasses. Some part of his mind registers the gear as shooting equipment but he’s still baffled by its presence in their living room.

“Uh, Hunk? What’s this?”

Hunk peeks over the top of his magazine and his expression turns to one of irritation. “Lance’s shooting gear. I told him not to leave it on the table, but he was in such a rush this afternoon. Maybe if he didn’t spend two hours at the shooting range in the morning, he wouldn’t be late to work.”

Hunk’s passive aggressive rant might have been funny if Keith’s brain wasn’t stuck on the first half of his statement.

“They’re Lance’s?”

“Yeah?” Hunk drops his magazine to look at Keith curiously when Keith doesn't immediately change his baffled expression. “Lance is a marksman. He’s done competitions and everything…You didn’t know?”

Keith shakes his head. His mind is reeling. How did he not know this about Lance? And is it bad that the image of Lance shooting that his brain supplied is so hot? Probably.

Hunk slides over on the couch to be next to Keith and pulls out his phone. A quick search online brings up a video titled “3-Gun Competition.”

“It’s not a great quality video, but here’s some of Lance’s last competition.” Hunk says. He hands his phone off to Keith as soon as he’s pressed play.

The video has a grainy quality that comes with most cell phone cameras, and it moves in the camera operator’s unsteady hands but it’s obviously the layout of a simple outdoor shooting range spread out before them. Lance steps into a view a few seconds later, but Keith can only recognize him by the paper attached to the back of his dark shirt declaring him “McClain.” His glasses are the same colored lenses on Keith’s lap but a cord around the back of his neck suggests he’s wearing ear plugs rather than the heavy-duty ear muffs.

Keith doesn’t know enough about firearms to identify the gun he picks up as anything other than a rifle, but Lance holds it expertly up to his shoulder. The camera zooms in on Lance’s face as he takes aim and there’s a harsh crease in his brow as he lines up the shot. Keith wracks his brain trying to determine if he’s ever seen Lance look so serious before.

The first shot startles Keith, but he adjusts quickly to the rapid-fire shooting. The camera zooms out again to showcase the targets. They’re too far away for Keith to see anything other than the occasional cloud of dust in the distance, but if the satisfied chuckle from the camera operator means anything, Lance must be doing well.

Lance puts the rifle somewhere off screen and darts across the way to another station. He lines up the second rifle to his shoulder, his back is to the camera but there’s no hesitation as he fires.

He doesn’t hear the door to the apartment open over the sound of video, so the sudden weight of Lance’s head on his shoulder startles him into dropping Hunk’s phone.

Hunk takes the phone back from him without a word, but Keith can hear the amusement in his voice as he greets Lance.

“Why were you watching that?” Lance asks and even over the greasy food smell that accompanies him home after work, Keith can smell cinnamon on his breath from his gum.

“Because _somebody_ left their gear on the table,” Hunk chimes in, happy to have a chance to scold Lance in person. “And Keith didn't know you shoot.”

Keith leans his head back to actually look at Lance, though the angle is hard and unflattering until Lance stands up and leans his hip against the back of the couch. His hair sticks up in a wild disarray from how he's wearing his work visor. “Why didn't you tell me about it?” Keith asks, and suddenly Lance is very interested in something across the room.

“It must just have not come up,” he says. He squeezes Keith's shoulder and pushes off the couch. “I'm gonna go shower off the fry smell before dinner.”

The distracted not-answer is the last response Keith could have expected from him. Especially considering how competent Lance looked with his firearms, the fact that he hadn't ever bragged about his abilities, and totally ignored the chance to do it now, doesn't make any sense. Lance disappears down the hall before either Keith or Hunk can stop him. At least the abrupt brush off seems as strange to Hunk, who shrugs with an apologetic smile before he gets up from the couch.

“Pidge! You're suppose to be washing them!” Hunk shouts the moment he returns to the kitchen.

“I am!”

“With _your hands_.”

Keith's not sure he wants to know what's happening in the kitchen.

“Okay, _but_ Hunk, _look,_ ”

There's a brief silence, in which Keith can hear the shower start on the other side of the apartment and quiet splashing from the kitchen.

“...Okay, what did you use to waterproof Rover? Because that is really cool.”

Keith shakes his head at the two of them. Pidge really knew how to work her roommates.

He gathers the gear Lance still hasn’t taken and his bag and heads to Lance’s room. He flips off the selfie still mocking him in the hall. The door is still shut, but now that Lance is home, Keith feels less bad about going in without him. It looks to be the same level of chaos it was the last time Keith was over. His desk is clean with only his laptop sitting open on top of it and his camera off to the side. It’s an anomaly in the sea of piled laundry and stacked textbooks. His variety of skin and hair creams line the edge of his dresser like a make-up counter, above the mess but in a chaotic pattern all their own. Settling on the desk as the safest place, Keith drops the shooting gear besides the laptop. He accidentally bumps the mouse with the headphones, and the screen flashes to life.

The screensaver is of their living room. Pidge is slumped against a sleeping Hunk. A DS is open in her hands, but she looks fast asleep as well. On the other side of the couch, Keith is curled up against the arm of the couch. To his complete mortification, he cradles a stuffed cat he recognizes as Lance’s in his arms. Lance’s face is centered in the selfie. He holds a cheeky peace sign up to the camera with his freehand.

A sudden gasp comes from behind him. Keith whirls around to find Lance standing in the doorway, a towel wrapped around his hips and his uniform crumpled in one hand. His exaggerated, shocked expression morphs into a devilish smirk. He wiggles his eyebrows.

“Keith! A quickie when my roommates are home!? I didn’t know you were such an exhibitionist!” He calls dramatically, voice directed more to the hallway than Keith himself.

“You’re the only exhibitionist we know!” Pidge shouts back a moment later. “Leave Keith alone!”

Keith shakes his head as Lance laughs and shuts his bedroom door.

“You probably gave Hunk a heart attack.” He admonishes.

Lance doesn’t seem particularly bothered by that as he drapes his uniform over his desk chair and leans into Keith. “We could give him something to really freak out about.” He whispers, lowly.

Keith can tell by the spark in his eyes that Lance is joking. But he also knows exactly what he could do to take all humor out of the offer.

He pushes Lance out of his face with a finger to his forehead, rolling his eyes. “You _are_ an exhibitionist.”

Lance winks as he moves away. “Only for you, babe.”

Keith whirls around as Lance goes to his dresser before he gets caught doing something embarrassing and revealing. Like blushing. He drops onto Lance’s bed, the only other remotely safe area in the room, with his bag beside him. An obscene, messy nest of blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals (the same stuffed cat from the picture and a shark) suggest Lance had spent the night before binging. He always liked to be surrounded when watching things. When Hunk, Pidge, and Keith or his siblings weren’t around for him to take advantage of, he used any material available.

Lance sings along with music on his phone as he gets dressed. He seems like his usual self, his brusque brush-off from before nothing more than a fluke or maybe the result of a long day at work. But the fact that he kept it a secret still sits funny with Keith.

Lance gives up after slipping on boxers and sweatpants and drops onto the bed, and Keith’s lap, shirtless, already tapping away at some kind of game on his phone. Keith shifts his legs to allow him a more comfortable position, bumping his backpack in the process. His hands go instinctively to rest on Lance’s back. His skin is still warm from the shower and goosebumps spread under his hands.

“Seriously what is the point of your gloves if you’re always so damn cold, Mullet?” Lance snaps, twitching away from Keith’s poking fingers but not actually moving off him. Or telling him to stop.

So, Keith ignores his whining and continues mapping out the planes of his back with his hands. There’s a light scattering of freckles on Lance’s shoulders, barely visible, but that Keith knows, come summer, will have darkened and multiplied. There’s a crescent-shaped scar, about as long as his finger, under his right shoulder blade from when he and his brother Marco tried to race bikes down a hill as kids and Lance crashed-landed into a neighbor’s fence. Not for the first time, he wants to press a kiss to it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Keith asks as his hands hesitate over the blemish, fingers tracing the shape.

Lance freezes in his lap and a moment later Keith hears the tell-tale sound of a ‘Game Over’ come from his phone. Still, Lance doesn’t turn to look at him.

“You were good in the video. That seems like something you’d want to share.” He continues, hoping something will push Lance into talking. “And I don’t know the first thing about guns, so you could even lord that over me.”

Finally, Lance starts to roll to face him, but the movement knocks Keith’s bag the rest of the way over. Now it is Keith’s turn to freeze in place as a small white and pink book tumbles out alongside his keys and a couple pens.

The moment he recovers he lunges for the book, but Lance is closer and faster, and grabs it first. Rolling off the bed to keep it out of Keith’s reach, he flips it over.

“ _Loving You_ by Maureen Child?” There’s a long pause before an absolutely heinous grin splits his face. “Holy shit, is this a _romance_ novel?”

“Lance,” Keith tries his best to keep his voice steady as he reaches for him, but Lance darts out of reach again. “Just put the book down.”

“’Now welcome back to tiny Chandler, California, where there’s always an extra place at the table and Mama Candellano is ready to offer lots of unsolicited advice, especially in matters of the heart,’” Lance reads off the back.

Keith feels a horrible sinking in his chest.

Lance waves the book in front of him, and though he’s doing a remarkable job of not actually doing it aloud, Keith can tell he’s laughing at him. “Keith, what is this doing in your backpack?”

“I-I’m…it’s Shiro’s!” Keith doesn't even care that his brother would kill him for passing around that kind of information, just as long as Lance doesn't know the truth.

Lance studies him for a minute, as if considering what Keith said, but when he starts to thumb through the book, Keith knows he’s done for.

“Really? Why do you have it?”

He’s digging a deeper hole but he can’t seem to stop the lie from coming out. “I…just found it, at the used bookstore down the road. It was on sale so I picked it up for him. I know he’s a fan of Maureen Child. _Only_ because he talks about these books with me _way_ too often.”

Lance stops near the end of the book and plucks a business card out of the pages. Holding it between two fingers he flashes it towards Keith. It was for the mechanics shop he worked at part time.

“So, this isn’t your bookmark?”

Keith gulps. “No?”

Lance clears his throat, adopting a strange, exaggerated accent. “’Her mind drifted, shut down, and her senses took over. His hands were everywhere at once. Her skin was on fire. And she didn’t care. All she wanted was to feel. To have him show her everything she’d ever dreamed of. To have Nick inside her.’” The accent broke when Lance started to laugh. “Holy fuck it’s an _erotic,_ romance novel.”

Keith feels his face flush as he climbs off the bed and tries, again to grab the book from Lance. “For the love of God, put the book down.”

Lance dances away from him again, still reading aloud from the book, but Keith is determined.

“’Up, up, his fingertips slid along her thigh, then drifted to the inside, higher, higher until he reached the thin silk barrier of her panties. He actually growled and rolled her onto her back. Levering himself up on one elbow, he looked down into her eyes and said’-“

Keith lunges for him, but Lance reacts faster than he’s expecting and Keith crashes into him, slamming them both against the back wall. Lance’s dresser shakes beside them. And Lance still dangles the book over Keith’s head, smiling down at him as his free hand wraps around his waist, holding him in place.

Keith glares, lifting onto his tiptoes in an effort to reach the book, but Lance is still too tall.

“What are you guys doing in there?” Hunk’s muffled voice comes through the wall, probably worried about the thumping. And Lance’s quickie joke from before.

Keith’s eyes widen. It was bad enough for Lance to know, but he definitely couldn’t live through Pidge and Hunk’s teasing.

“I tripped over my books!” Lance calls back. His eyes never leave Keith’s and his smile relaxes into something a little softer. It makes Keith’s stupid, traitorous heart flutter.

Keith feels himself relax too, despite Lance still holding the book out of reach, as Hunk scolds Lance for keeping his room a mess through the walls. Maybe Lance isn’t _totally_ terrible.

Lance’s voice drops into a sultry whisper. “’Then slowly, tantalizingly slowly, his fingers moved closer to the heart of her. She lifted her hips in anticipation. She didn’t know what to expect. What to feel. What to do. God, why didn’t she know what to do? He touched her. Tasha splintered.’”

Keith buries his face in Lance’s chest, groaning. Never mind, he is the absolute worst. “I will give you all the change in my pockets if you shut up right now.”

Lance laughs, tossing his head back and cracking it against the wall. His defense lowered, Keith jumps for the book, snatching it out of his hands and darting back across the room. Shoving it back into his backpack, and hugging the bag close to his chest, he glares as Lance rubs the back of his head and slinks back across the room after him.

“You deserved that.” Keith informs him.

Lance smiles sheepishly. “Yeah probably.”

Lance drops back onto the bed and pats the empty space beside him. Keith studies him for a few seconds before relenting and climbing back onto the bed. But he places his bag on the end of the bed, as far away from Lance’s nosy hands as possible.

“So, it’s totally yours, right?” Lance asks.

Keith buries his face in his hands. Why did he sit down again? He should have gone to the kitchen. At least Hunk was nice to him most of the time.

Lance pokes him with his foot when he doesn’t reply and Keith swats him away half-heartedly.

“Yes. It’s mine. Happy?”

Lance grins. “Oh, more than you know. But you have to know, I have more questions.”

Keith starts to roll his eyes, when he gets an idea. It might be the one good thing to come out of the fiasco, so he has to take a chance.

He lifts his head and meets Lance’s gaze with a serious look. “Tell me about your shooting and I’ll tell you about the book.”

Lance’s brows raise in surprise, and at first Keith thinks he will be brushed off again, but after a moment Lance nods.

“Okay.”

“Really?”

“If you really want to know that badly,” Lance shrugs one shoulder, as if it was nothing, but there’s a tenseness to the movement that Keith notices immediately. “My dad and granddad taught me,” he starts and Keith immediately knows where his hesitance to talk about the subject comes from. “Well _abuelito_ taught me, it was our ‘thing’ to do together. When he passed away I stopped doing it, but my dad got me back into it in high school…when everything went to hell. It gave me something to focus on when I got stressed without the results weighing on me, you know? In school I had to have good grades, and on the swim team I had to have good times…it was before I got into photography, so it gave me another outlet. I could just clear my head and focus on the target right in front of me, not everything else.”

Keith places a hand on Lance’s leg, and it’s basically nothing, but he hopes by now his friend knows the feelings he puts behind it that he can’t quite put into words. And Lance bounces his leg a little at the touch, flashing Keith a quick smile. _He knows._

“That video was from three years ago,” _From before his dad died,_ is what Lance doesn’t say, but Keith can fill in the blank easily enough. “I just recently got back into it, this semester’s just been kicking my ass…which you knew, and I don’t know, I just thought, it worked in the past so, what the hell?”

Keith nods encouragingly, but Lance doesn’t say anything else so he pushes on himself. “But there’s nothing wrong with needing an outlet, I have one with taekwondo. You _know_ I have one, so why didn’t you want to tell _me_?”

Lance drops his head back and Keith is once again reminded of how elegantly long every part of him seems to be. Even though now was _definitely_ not the time to be checking out his friend-slash-sometimes-fuck-buddy.

Lance still doesn’t say anything so Keith pushes against his leg until Lance sighs.

“It’s stupid,”

“Lance,”

Lance sits up with a huff. “Shooting isn’t like martial arts. You have this whole ideology about self-defense and non-violence and yeah you could argue being able to use a firearm is a form of self-defense but I don’t even actually own a gun so let’s be real, that’s bullshit. And shooting is basically just having good aim and you have this whole extra set of skills I can’t even imagine because of your 'outlet' and you’ve dedicated most of your life to it when I just pick up and drop this whenever it gets too hard and” Lance huffs again. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Keith isn’t totally sure what his face is doing, but he ignores that for the moment. “You didn’t tell me because shooting isn’t…as honorable as taekwondo?”

“It’s stupid, okay? I know,”

Keith nods. “You’re right, it is stupid,” Lance shoves him, but he was expecting as much and manages not to be dislodged from his seat. “But I’m glad you told me.”

Lance crosses his arms over his chest, squinting at Keith distrustfully. “Why?”

“So, I can tell you it’s stupid to be worried about something like that and we can move on. My dad got me into taekwondo classes because I was always getting into fights and had too much energy at home, so he wanted to give me somewhere to channel all that extra energy and rage. And if you think I didn’t also use what I learned in wildly inappropriate ways in the past, you’re giving me too much credit.”

Lance rolls his eyes, but there’s a ghost of a smile back on his lips and Keith matches the look. “And I’m sure there’s more to shooting than just good aim.”

Lance shrugs again, but the tension is gone. “Eh, not really.” This time when he smiles, it’s full force and suddenly it feels like the world has righted itself again. Keith hadn’t even realized it was off-kilter. Lance nudges him with his foot, and Keith forces the dopey smile he wore in response to Lance’s own grin off his face.

“What?”

“Since when are you so good at this?”

“I promise I will go back to my regularly scheduled, anti-social robot speech in a few minutes.”

Lance exaggeratedly wipes a hand over his forehead. “Thank God, I was a little worried for a moment.”

A knock comes on the bedroom door. “Uh…is everybody decent in there?” Hunk calls.

“Lance’s never been decent a day in his life,” Keith replies immediately.

Lance lunges for him, pressing knuckles into his head as he holds him down against the mattress. “Oh, you’re one to talk! Look at this hair!”

The bedroom door opens a moment later and Hunk stands in the doorway looking down at them with a mix of amusement and disapproval. “I’m taking that as a yes. Dinner’s ready.”

“Thanks Hunk. We’ll be out in a minute.” Lance promises with a sweet smile. Keith tries to push him off but Lance just drops more of his weight to hold him in place.

Hunk looks between the two of them, as if trying to decide if he should interfere or not, before turning on his heel, pulling the door shut behind him.

“So, why aren’t we going right now?” Keith asks, voice muffled against Lance’s blankets.

“Seriously? You make me spill my heart and completely forget your half of the bargain?”

Keith’s stomach drops. Right. The book. Dammit.

Lance knows the instant he remembers and pokes his shoulder insistently. “So? C’mon, Mullet. Spill. Why do you have an erotic, romance novel in your backpack?”

Keith sighs. “Uh, because I like them?”

There’s a pause where Lance seems to be allowing the words to register before he reacts. By smacking Keith with a pillow.

“Because you ‘like them’? You’re the absolute worst. I’m breaking up with you.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “Too bad we’re not actually dating and you can’t.”

Lance freezes on top of him and Keith isn’t sure what he’s said wrong now, but he immediately opens his mouth to take it back when Lance speaks again.

“So. I’m stuck with you?”

And the words might sound harsh, but there’s a smile pressed against the back of his neck that fills him with a stupid, giddy kind of warmth.

“Yeah, you’re stuck with me.”

Lance falls to the side to face him, though his legs stay draped over Keith’s to pin him in place. “Which means you’re also stuck with me, so are you going to give me a real answer?”

Keith drops his face into the blankets, and wonders if he could smother himself to avoid the conversation, but Lance has proven stronger than he looks and could probably pull him off the bed before he actually managed it.

“They have happy endings,” he finally says. “And I like that. That guarantee. That things work out, and people get to be happy.” He turns to face Lance again to find he’s being watched with an unreadable expression. “Now that’s a stupid reason for something, isn’t it?”

Lance reaches out and brushes hair away from his eyes, tucking it behind his ear, and Keith can’t even bring himself to be mad at how much he reacts to the simple touch.

“No, that’s the least stupid reason I’ve ever heard.”

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't want to spoil how lesbianakari inspired me, because I had far too much fun putting it into the piece to ruin it in the author's note, but once upon a time we were discussing Keith's language (i.e. "I cradled you in my arms!") and they pointed out that this sounded more like something out of a cheesy romance novel, not normal, every day speech (esp. of a teenage boy) and so the headcanon of romance novels being his guilty pleasure was born. We somehow got back to the subject this weekend and I finally had the epiphany of how to fix this piece by making Keith's secret a parallel to Lance's that allowed them to talk and allowed me to be okay with keeping Lance's use of guns in the story because I personally do not like guns, but I wanted to do something with his "sharp shooter" title, aside from the photography.
> 
> I personally have not finished Loving You, but I have read Child's A Crazy Kind of Love probably upwards of fifteen times and highly recommend it. And I have an obnoxious collection of romance novels, so this is probably not the last time I will employ this hc for Keith.
> 
> As always you're welcome to come yell at me, request new things, or just stalk the progress of other fics on tumblr @ thathopelessromantic.tumblr.com
> 
> Thanks for reading, especially those of you who have been following this series for a while, your continued support means the world to me!! <3 <3


End file.
